Observations, musings & outright lies

Apps, Apps and More Apps

I love my iPhone. I love that this one little machine lets me make phone calls, watch movies, listen to music, surf the net, take pictures, tweet and generally kill time when I’m bored.

So, what apps do I have on my phone that I cherish? My two favorites are Texas Hold’em and Shazam.

Hold’em is exactly what it sounds like. Video poker against a full table of AI characters that don’t play perfectly and have habits you can figure out.

The characters have different personalities, evidenced mainly through their reactions when they win or lose hands. I hate the chick in the picture. She’s smug and I enjoy eliminating her when I can.

Lots of locales and tables to play at with different degrees of difficulty, or maybe I just suck at poker after 10 minutes of game play. The game costs $5 (okay, $4.99 thanks to marketing geniuses), but I’ve gotten my money’s worth. And if you come over to my place someday or we’re ever somewhere and can both join a wireless network, we can play against each other. As long as you, too, have a cool iPhone like me.

A friend at work told me about Shazam. It’s awesome goodness for free. You know those times when you hear a really good song in the car but you don’t know what it is and are listening to one of those stations that only identify songs every 20 minutes or so? Shazam is for just this occasion. Activate the app, hit “tag now” and hold the microphone end of the phone toward the speakers.

Shazam listens and then beams information to the mother ship where tiny hamsters run a complicated algorithm, file away your interests as part of the future invasion plan and beam back the song and artist information to your phone along with links to buy the song on iTunes if you feel like it. All within 30 seconds or so. All true, except for the hamsters. It’s the klipspringers who are planning the invasion.

Anyway, Shazam saves all of your tags so you can go back later and see what you liked. Santogold, The Ting Tings, Muse and Katy Perry are artists I might check out thanks to Billy Batson’s elderly friend.

What else am I enjoying, app-wise? The Facebook and Twitterific apps come in handy. By the way, follow small_pond on twitter for notices when new posts appear and mini-blogs throughout my day such as “Misread Ceylon as Cylon in the AP Stylebook and thought AP was really cool. Then I thought I was really not,” and “Jackie Chan sings in front of the memory tower. My Olympics are complete.”

Oh, and don’t forget to download More Cowbell. Comes complete with a Walken soundbite and lets you become part of BOC whenever you feel the urge.